O by Jonathan Margolis Read Free Book Online Page A

contact ups the ante, while kissing, in the cultures where it exists and is not regarded as disgusting (as it is by the Thonga people in Mozambique and some Finnish Laplanders) or verging on cannibalistic (as the Chinese once believed it to be), raises the temperature several notches further. Hands and fingers, or alternatively feet and toes, may venture towards the genital area, the inner thighs and the woman’s breasts, teasingly at first, a little more earnestly as affirmative signals flash back and forth between the putative lovers. The voice, encouraging, cajoling, affectionately teasing, also plays an important part in this ‘fore-play’ stage.
    Facial expressions, too, are key to building and maintaining the heavy sexual atmosphere required for intercourse to occur. Talking can be a double-edged sword in sex, however, for it can bring about a premature end to lovemaking before it has even started. Both parties pre-sex are in a delicate state of high sensitivity and excitement – two rather incompatible conditions. A careless word or form of words by either – but more usually by the male, who tends to be mentally and physically further along the track towards orgasm than the female at this stage, and hence abandoning subtlety by the minute -can ruin things, especially for the female, for whom delicate mental scene-setting is often more important than for the male.
    Backstage, you might say, major bodily changes are taking place during this often protracted time of sexual arousal, as it typically segues from a flirtatious incline that might takeseveral hours to develop, into a brief but steeper ascent to intercourse itself. There will also classically be a change of location now, from a standing area such as the street or dance floor, or an upright seat, to something more horizontal – a sofa, a floor, a bed. For reasons we will look at later, Nature appears to have gone to some pains to coax upright, bipedal human beings into adopting a horizontal position when they finally mate.
    The first major bodily modification in this new phase concerns the distribution of blood supply, which begins to be diverted from the organs and muscles to the skin surface. The body accordingly feels hotter to the touch – the pre-sexual radiance that makes lovers appear flushed. Blushing of the face and neck is what appears to the eye, since the participants’ clothes are normally still on at this point, but there is more widespread reddening of the skin, especially in the female. It spreads, not unlike a measles rash, from the stomach and upper abdomen, to the upper part of the breasts (which are already starting to swell perceptibly with the onrush of blood), and then to the upper chest, the underside of the breasts, the shoulders and the elbows. Men’s skin reddens with the sexual flush in similar areas, plus the forearms and thighs.
    The swelling of the breasts in women as intercourse approaches is caused by vaso-congestion – the effect of arteries pumping blood into the area faster than the veins can drain it. Similar swelling and hardening also starts to occur in the man’s penis, which may well be fully erect under his clothing by this time, although his erect organ serves more as a sexual signal of intent for the moment than as a sexual tool.
    Less noticeable is the swelling of soft parts of the nose and expansion of the nostrils; the sensation of breathing heated air as orgasm later approaches is far from illusory. Additionally, the nose should not be disregarded as a sexual instrument. It has long been an evolutionary puzzle why human beings have developed such extraordinarily outsize noses compared to the neater, snub-shaped breathing apparatus of apes. Perhaps there is a correlation here with the outsize penis noted previously.
    And more is now known of the enhanced role of smell in both the pre-copulatory and coital phases of human sexual intercourse. Along with the heavy two-way